The European Commission has unveiled its first-ever Anti-Poverty Strategy today, calling on member states to expand social and affordable housing, reinforce welfare support and prevent evictions, with the long-term ambition of eradicating poverty across the EU by 2050.
The package, presented in Brussels by Executive Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu, also includes new measures on homelessness, an upgraded Child Guarantee and reforms to make access to social benefits less bureaucratic. Commission figures show around 92.7 million people in the EU remain at risk of poverty or social exclusion and close to one million are homeless. Brussels has acknowledged the bloc is unlikely to meet its earlier commitment to lift at least 15 million people out of poverty by 2030.
Yet the same Commission has continued to preside over one of the largest sustained immigration flows in the bloc’s history. EU countries issued 3.5 million first-residence permits to non-EU nationals in 2024, with Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy and France absorbing the largest shares, according to Eurostat. A further 913,000 people lodged first-time asylum applications across the bloc that year, of whom 438,000 were granted protection.
A POPULATION FAR MORE EXPOSED TO POVERTY
Non-EU citizens already living in the bloc are statistically the demographic most likely to be poor. Eurostat figures published in September 2025 showed that 43.8 per cent of non-EU citizens residing in the EU faced the risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2024, against 18.5 per cent of nationals living in their own country. Some 35.2 per cent of non-EU citizens were below the income poverty line, compared with 14.1 per cent of nationals. Severe material and social deprivation affected 15 per cent of non-EU citizens, against 5.4 per cent of nationals.
The gap is starker among young arrivals. Eurostat data for 2023 showed young non-EU citizens were roughly twice as likely to be at risk of poverty or social exclusion as young EU nationals living in their own country, and three times more likely to leave education and training early.
Each annual cohort of new permit-holders therefore enters a category in which more than two in five face poverty risk on arrival. On Eurostat’s averages, that translates to around 1.5 million people moving into the at-risk-of-poverty pool every year through legal channels alone, swelling the very group the new strategy is meant to shrink.
HOUSING, BENEFITS AND CHILDREN
Brussels has urged national governments to bolster eviction prevention through emergency rental aid, mediation services and debt counselling, and to expand social housing stock. The Commission also wants to make benefits easier to claim, after finding that up to half of eligible citizens in some member states do not apply for the support to which they are entitled.
The package reinforces the European Child Guarantee, the bloc’s main instrument against child poverty, after years of stagnant progress. Brussels has warned that close to one in four children in the EU remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion, and has proposed improving family access to childcare, education, mental healthcare and school meals.
The strategy also updates the EU’s disability plan to 2030. Brussels has noted that only 55 per cent of people with disabilities are in employment, against 77 per cent of those without, while almost one in three faces poverty or social exclusion. Measures include the rollout of the European Disability Card and new initiatives to make transport, digital tools and artificial intelligence applications more accessible.
NO FRESH MONEY, NO IMMIGRATION REVIEW
Despite Brussels’ insistence that fighting poverty would be a political priority for the years ahead, the strategy contains no new dedicated funding. It would lean instead on existing instruments such as the European Social Fund, cohesion funds and InvestEU. Mînzatu told Euronews ahead of the launch that around €100 billion from the Commission’s proposal for the next long-term EU budget would be earmarked for poverty prevention, though that figure rests on a budget yet to be agreed by member states.
The plan also avoids any reassessment of the immigration policy that keeps feeding the at-risk pool. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who pledged in her State of the Union address in September 2025 to eradicate EU poverty by 2050, has continued to back legal-immigration expansion, the EU’s Pact on Asylum and Immigration and external resettlement schemes, even as her own services log non-EU citizens as the demographic most exposed to deprivation.
With less than five years before the interim 2030 target, the latest Eurostat figures still showing 20.9 per cent of the population at risk, and inflows of low-income third-country nationals running at multiples of any plausible reduction trajectory, the new strategy may struggle to convince observers that the 2050 deadline is more than aspirational.
